Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global
Warming Swindle”

2. Complete Transcript and Rebuttal

[Nigel Lawson]

She was very concerned, always – I remember when I was Secretary of State for Energy – to promote
nuclear power, long before the issue of climate change came up, because she was concerned about
energy security; and she didn’t trust the Middle East, and she didn’t trust the National Union of Mineworkers: so she didn’t trust oil, and she didn’t trust coal. Therefore she felt we really had to push ahead with nuclear power. And then when the
climate change/global warming thing came up, she felt: “well this is great: this is another argument – because it doesn’t have any carbon dioxide emissions – this is another argument why you should go for nuclear. And
that is what she was really, largely, saying. It’s been misrepresented since then.

[Nigel Calder]

And so she said to the scientists – she went to the
Royal Society and she said: “there’s money on the table for you to prove this stuff”. So of course they went away and did that.

[Comment 71: There are two speeches by Mrs. Thatcher’s to the
Royal Society that mention climate change (http://tinyurl.com/2kvovo,
http://tinyurl.com/2n5n5a), neither of which contain anything that could be construed as meaning “there’s money on the table for you to prove this stuff,” or even mention the funding of climate science.]

(In breach of Ofcom 5.7, 5.10)

[Dr Philip Stott]

Inevitably, the moment politicians put their weight behind something, and attach their name to it –
in some ways, of course, money will flow; that’s the way it goes. And inevitably research development institutions started to bubble up – if we
can put it that way – which were going to be researching climate change; but with a particular
emphasis on the relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature.

[Narrator]

At the request of Mrs Thatcher, the UK Met Office set up a Climate Modelling Unit, which provided
the basis for a new international committee called The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, or IPCC.

[Comment 72: This history of the IPCC is inaccurate and apparently intentionally misleading. In fact, the
IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the
United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP). These organizations, together with the
International Council for
Science, had individually and collectively organized conferences in 1979 and 1985, which expressed
concern about the human impact on the climate. They subsequently established the
Advisory Group on
Greenhouse Gases (AGGG) to “ensure periodic assessments of the state of scientific on climate change and its implications.” (http://tinyurl.com/3ccs3h, PDF). This process culminated in the IPCC, which was proposed in the 10th Congress of the WMO in
May 1987 (see
http://tinyurl.com/yobhym, PDF, and the timeline from Australian Bureau of Meteorology at
http://tinyurl.com/2ex6rr), before its establishment in 1988.